Program

Thursday, April 11, 2013, at 8:00Friday, April 12, 2013, at 8:00Saturday, April 13, 2013, at 8:00Tuesday, April 16, 2013, at 7:30

Chicago Symphony orchestrariccardo muti ConductorChicago Symphony Chorus

Duain Wolfe DirectorEleonora Buratto Sopranoanna malavasi Mezzo-sopranoSaimir Pirgu Tenoradam Plachetka Bass-baritone

robert Chen Violinmathieu Dufour FluteYukie ota FluteEugene Izotov Oboe d’amoreScott Hostetler Oboe d’amoreDaniel gingrich HornDavid mcgill BassoonDennis michel Bassoon

Continuo:John Sharp Celloalexander Hanna BassDavid Schrader Organmark Shuldiner Harpsichord

One HunDreD TwenTy-SeCOnD SeASOn

Chicago Symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music DirectorPierre Boulez Helen regenstein Conductor emeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

(continued)

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J.S. BachMass in B Minor, BwV 232

KyrieChorus: Kyrie eleisonDuet: Christe eleison (eleOnOrA BurATTO, AnnA MAlAVASi)Chorus: Kyrie eleison

gloriaChorus: Gloria in excelsisChorus: et in terra paxAria: laudamus te (AnnA MAlAVASi)Chorus: Gratias agimus tibiDuet: Domine Deus (eleOnOrA BurATTO, SAiMir PirGu)Chorus: Qui tollis peccata mundiAria: Qui sedes ad dextram Patris (AnnA MAlAVASi)Aria: Quoniam tu solus sanctus (ADAM PlACHeTKA)Chorus: Cum Sancto Spiritu

IntErmISSIon

Credo (Symbolum nicenum)Chorus: Credo in unum DeumChorus: Credo / Patrem omnipotentemDuet: et in unum Dominum (eleOnOrA BurATTO, AnnA MAlAVASi)Chorus: et incarnatus estChorus: CrucifixusChorus: et resurrexitAria: et in Spiritum sanctum Dominum (ADAM PlACHeTKA)Chorus: ConfiteorChorus: et expecto resurrectionem

SanctusChorus: SanctusChorus 1 & 2: Osanna in excelsisAria: Benedictus (SAiMir PirGu)Chorus 1 & 2: Osanna in excelsis

agnus DeiAria: Agnus Dei (AnnA MAlAVASi)Chorus: Dona nobis pacem

The CSO thanks Randy and Melvin Berlin for their generous support of these performances.This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Comments by PhilliP huscher

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mass in B minor, BWV 232

Johann Sebastian BachBorn March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany.Died July 28, 1750, Leipzig, Germany.

We now believe that in his final days, Johann Sebastian Bach

worked not on The Art of Fugue, which he left unfinished at his death, but on his great Mass in B minor. It was, in many respects, the summation of his life’s work, although, at the time, Bach did not expect that it would ever even be performed, let alone revered. In the years immediately following Bach’s death in 1750, public knowledge of his music was nil, even though other, more cosmopolitan compos-ers, such as Handel, who died only nine years later, remained popular. It is true that Mozart came to know and admire several of Bach’s works—Mozart attended private concerts in the home of the Viennese aristocrat Baron van Seiten in the 1780s, where, he reported: “Nothing is played but Handel and Bach.” And Beethoven, at eleven or twelve, mastered The Well-Tempered Clavier, to the great delight of his piano teacher. But outside the world of professional musicians, Bach had become no more than a figure from the distant past.

Bach himself drew a copy of his family tree in 1735, near the time

of his fiftieth birthday. He made a place for himself, and for his many children, among the generations of Bachs whose name was already synonymous with music. Johann Sebastian could readily see that he was not the first, nor would he be the last—his sons had already taken care of that—in a line of compos-ers unique in history. He did not make room for Veit Bach—a baker by trade and the first Bach family member to show musical skill—who died sometime before 1578; he has been rescued by modern musicology. It was still too early to expect that any of his own grand-children would continue the tradi-tion, although Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, born nine years after his grandfather’s death, would carry the family business well into the next century. Ultimately, there were more than eighty musicians named Bach who worked over the span of three centuries.

Bach seemed unconcerned with leaving us any information about his life and career beyond the basic résumé of court and church posi-tions. “Since he never wrote down anything about his life,” his son

Bach’s portrait by e.G. Haussmann (1746)

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Carl Philipp Emanuel said, “the gaps are unavoidable.” With dozens of students to teach, music to write on order day in and day out, and ten children to raise (another ten died in infancy), he appeared to be too busy to worry about poster-ity. Despite repeated requests, he neglected to submit anything for publication in a biographi-cal dictionary of the important musicians of the day. Only one portrait of Bach was painted during his lifetime (see page 32), and, as a result, we have a solitary image of the composer—a stern, stolid, rather unimaginative looking man quite at odds with the brilliant, dramatic, and often joyous music he wrote. It is easy to subscribe to the common view of Bach as the most unassuming of composers, satis-fied to work far from the limelight, writing music to please himself, with no aspirations to the larger world or the fame and fortune that Handel, his exact contemporary, enjoyed. But the B minor mass was clearly conceived not for a church

congregation, but for posterity. (Bach knew the mass would go unperformed during his lifetime, since it fit neither the Protestant nor the Catholic liturgy.) And although composers did not yet think that their music would be played long after their deaths—they themselves seldom performed that of their predecessors—Bach evi-dently wanted to leave something extraordinary and timeless behind.

The Mass in B minor may well have been a late-in-life idea,

but its genesis follows a long and twisted path, spanning decades and bringing together newly composed music, older mass movements, and still other music originally written for different purposes, but revised for use in the mass. (Throughout his career, Bach regularly resorted to the common “parody” technique—fitting older music to a new text—in this case, not to save time and trouble, but to incorpo-rate the finest music he had yet composed into this comprehensive

ComPoSED1714–1749; assembled 1747–1749

FIrSt PErFormanCEcomplete: 1859, leipzig

FIrSt CSo SuBSCrIPtIon ConCErt PErFormanCEJanuary 8, 1935, Orchestra Hall. Jeannette Vreeland, Kathryn witwer, rose Bampton, Dan Gridley, and Chase Baromeo as soloists; Apollo Music Club; Frederick Stock conducting

moSt rECEnt CSo PErFormanCEJanuary 28, 1990, Orchestra Hall. Felicity lott, Anne Sofie von Otter, Hans Peter Blochwitz, william Shimell, and Gwynne Howell as soloists; Chicago Symphony Chorus; Sir Georg Solti conducting

InStrumEntatIontwo flutes, three oboes, two oboi d’amore, two bassoons, horn, three trumpets, timpani, continuo, strings

CSo rECorDIng1990. Felicity lott, Anne Sofie von Otter, Hans Peter Blochwitz, william Shimell, and Gwynne Howell as soloists; Chicago Symphony Chorus; Sir Georg Solti conducting. london

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work.) When the mass finally was assembled, it represented music written over four decades. With this work, Bach found a seemingly perfect and harmonious balance between the old and the new.

It is difficult to know when Bach first thought of preparing a monu-

mental setting of the mass text. Most of the work appears to have been done during the last decade of his life; it occupied him nearly to his dying day. The first significant installment dates from 1733, when Bach wrote a missa (essentially the Kyrie and Gloria we now know) to honor the new elector of Saxony. The Credo (or Symbolum Nicenum) was probably composed in the early 1740s. Later in the decade, when Bach decided to complete the mass, he added the massive choral Sanctus he had written in 1724 and reworked a number of earlier pieces as the final “Osanna,” “Benedictus,” “Agnus Dei,” and “Dona nobis pacem.”

It has not been difficult for musicology to track down Bach’s working process, but it is harder to understand his thinking. This is, after all, the first important mass written for no apparent practical purpose. Christoph Wolff, the distinguished Bach scholar, sug-gests that the B minor mass was assembled in order to preserve the summation of Bach’s art in vocal music, just as The Art of Fugue was compiled to demonstrate his unsur-passed ability in instrumental music. Both works show a mastery of coun-terpoint unmatched at the time—what Wolff calls “the ever-present

Bachian intention of excelling beyond himself and others.”

All his life, Bach had assembled sets and cycles of music—a liturgi-cal calendar of organ chorales, for example, or the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier in all the major and minor keys. In the last decade of his life, this fondness for unified sets became an obses-sion, inspiring the Musical Offering; the Goldberg Variations, a cycle of thirty variations generated by one musical subject; and The Art of Fugue, a compendium of fugal writ-ing, with all the fugues based on a single theme. The B minor mass was Bach’s final word on the art of writing sacred choral music—the culmination of a career that had produced the great Passions and hundreds of cantatas.

The complete mass was never performed during Bach’s lifetime, and with his death in 1750, it easily slipped into oblivion, the tempo-rary fate of virtually all his music. When C.P.E Bach led a perfor-mance of the Credo alone in 1784 in Hamburg, it was beyond dispute that this was music the audi-ence “had never heard before and would probably never hear again.” Even during the early nineteenth century, when Bach’s music came back to life—he was the first great composer to emerge from years of neglect—Bach was known primar-ily for The Well-Tempered Clavier or the organ music. The great Passions and the Mass in B minor were forgotten. Haydn, in his old age, acquired a manuscript copy of the mass. Beethoven apparently consulted its pages when writing

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his own Missa solemnis. The real reappraisal of Bach’s music came two years after Beethoven’s death, in 1829, when Mendelssohn led the landmark performance of the Saint Matthew Passion in Berlin. Truncated versions of the B minor mass followed in several German music centers, some under Mendelssohn’s direction. But it was only in Leipzig in 1859—more than a century after the composer’s death—that the first complete per-formance was given. Franz Liszt, one of the so-called musicians of the future, was in the audience. (By then, the score had been published at last. The Zurich publisher and collector Hans Georg Nägeli had purchased the autograph at auction in 1805, but although he quickly announced plans to publish “the greatest musical artwork of all times and peoples,” in the end that did not happen for another three decades, and then only piecemeal.)

It is easy to view the mass as a kind of summing-up, for it represents

an impressive diversity of material: the opening “Kyrie” is as elaborate a choral fugue as Bach ever wrote (and comparable in scale only to the opening chorus of the Saint Matthew Passion); the “Gratias”—and the final “Dona nobis pacem” which shares the same music—is an old-fashioned motet; the “Confiteor” is strictly canonic, over a roving bass line; “Et incarnatus est” is free and boldly expressive; the subsequent “Crucifixus” inches forward over a relentless passaca-glia; the “Credo” and “Confiteor” both use plainchant melodies.

The arias and duets, too, are richly diverse, with important instrumental countermelodies. Each of the Gloria’s four solo movements calls forward a differ-ent obbligato instrument (each one representing a different family of Bach’s orchestra—strings, flutes, reeds, and brass)—the violin paired with the female voice in “Laudamus te”; the flute turning the “Domine Deus” duet into a trio; the oboe d’amore imitating the singer in “Qui sedes”; the horn playing against the bass solo lines in “Quoniam.”

The B minor mass is no ad hoc compendium, however, but a work constructed to a master plan of carefully weighed proportions. The Kyrie and Gloria sections, for example, are conceived together as one large unit; the opening harmony of B minor does not resolve with the end of the Kyrie itself (which concludes in F-sharp minor) but only with the turn to D major (the relative major partner of B minor) at the end of the Gloria. The entire Credo is an architectural structure of perfect symmetry, with brilliant fugal choruses framing solo movements at either end, and, at the heart, that remarkable and powerful sequence of choruses beginning with the solemn “Et incarnatus est” and the “Crucifixus,” in which so few notes perfectly convey immeasurable grief, and then, from the depths of those final chords, the explosion of “Et resurrexit.” The sequence is a stroke of dramatic genius from a composer who never wrote a note of music for the theater. (This trio

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of movements, so perfectly apt as the centerpiece of the Credo, unites the oldest and newest music in the score: the “Crucifixus” is based on a cantata chorus dating from 1714; “Et incarnatus est,” something of an afterthought and composed in 1749, is the last piece of choral music Bach wrote.)

The Sanctus and the follow-ing movements, which date from 1748 and 1749, when the mass was being polished and completed, are all based on earlier works, yet even here Bach stretches the art of parody and revision to incorporate not only substantial changes, but newly composed music as well. The great Agnus Dei solo, a freely elaborated version of a cantata movement from 1725, is a perfect example of Bach’s determination to surpass even his own finest work. These final sections of the B minor mass, along with the incomplete quadruple fugue from The Art of Fugue, are the last pages of music Bach composed, in the first weeks of 1750 at the latest. Already in December of 1749, his signature on a dictated letter looks labored and stiff, a sign of the rapidly deteriorating eyesight that would soon put an end to his composing days. An operation by a famous English oculist who was lecturing in Leipzig in the spring of 1750 was botched. After that, Bach could no longer use his eyes. In mid-July, he temporarily regained partial vision, but then suffered a stroke within a few hours. He died ten days later. Not surprisingly, for a man who was

not a public figure, at least in the modern sense, we know very little about his funeral, not even what music was played.

Every generation has learned from the Mass in B minor,

and this timeless masterwork has survived the interpretative fashions of them all. Many of the questions we still ask today—how many singers should take each part? Is the unidentified solo instrument in the “Benedictus” a flute, or perhaps a violin?—are the same ones musicians have always asked. The answers keep changing: in the 1830s, Mendelssohn used a chorus of hundreds; in the 1980s, the American scholar Joshua Rifkin proposed that Bach intended the mass to be performed with just one singer to a part. Efforts to deter-mine how best to present Bach’s works date back to Mendelssohn’s day, when so little was known about the way music was presented in the previous century that a Bach performance style had to be virtually reinvented at the time. Today’s popular quest for historical authenticity in performances of this final testament to his art is merely our latest way of engaging with music that by its very nature, and by Bach’s own design, is meant for all people and all times.

Phillip Huscher is the program annota-tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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maSS In B mInor

KYrIE1. Chorus

Kyrie eleison.

2. Duet (eleonora Buratto, Anna Malavasi)

Christe eleison.

3. Chorus

Kyrie eleison.

glorIa4. Chorus

Gloria in excelsis Deo.

5. Chorus

Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

6. aria (Anna Malavasi; robert Chen, violin)

Laudamus te,benedicimus te,adoramus te,glorificamus te.

7. Chorus

Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam.

Lord, have mercy.

Glory to God in the highest,

and on earth peace to people of good will.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, have mercy.

We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you,

we give you thanks for your great glory,

9 (Please turn the page quietly.)

8. Duet (eleonora Buratto, Saimir Pirgu; Mathieu Dufour, flute)

Domine Deus, Rex coelestis,Deus Pater omnipotens,Domine Fili, unigenite,Jesu Christe altissime,Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris.

9. Chorus (Mathieu Dufour, yukie Ota, flutes)

Qui tollis peccata mundi,miserere nobis.Qui tollis peccata mundi,suscipe deprecationem nostram.

10. aria (Anna Malavasi; eugene izotov, oboe d’amore)

Qui sedes ad dextram Patris,

miserere nobis.

11. aria (Adam Plachetka; Daniel Gingrich, horn; David McGill, Dennis Michel, bassoons)

Quoniam tu solus sanctus.Tu solus Dominus.Tu solus altissimus, Jesu Christe.

12. Chorus

Cum Sancto Spiritu in gloria Dei Patris. Amen.

you are seated at the right hand of the Father,

have mercy on us.

For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ,

Lord God, heavenly King, O God, almighty Father.Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son,Jesus Christ, most high,Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father,

you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us; you take away the sins of the world, receive our prayer;

with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

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CrEDo (SYmBolum nICEnum)13. Chorus

Credo in unum Deum.

14. Chorus

Credo in unum Deum,Patrem omnipotentem,factorem coeli et terrae,visibilium omnium et invisibilium.

15. Duet (eleonora Buratto, Anna Malavasi; eugene izotov, Scott Hostetler, oboi d’amore;

David McGill, bassoon)

Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum,

Filium Dei unigenitumet ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula.Deum de Deo,lumen de lumine,Deum verum de Deo vero,genitum, non factum consubstantialem Patri,per quem omnia facta sunt.Qui propter nos homineset propter nostram salutem descendit

de coelis.

16. Chorus

Et incarnatus estde Spiritu Sancto ex Maria virgine,et homo factus est.

17. Chorus

Crucifixus etiam pro nobissub Pontio Pilato,passus et sepultus est.

I believe in one God.

I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven,

and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried,

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18. Chorus

Et resurrexit tertia diesecundum scripturas.Et ascendit in coelum,sedet ad dextram Dei Patris.

Et iterum venturus est cum gloriajudicare vivos et mortuos,cujus regni non erit finis.

19. aria (Adam Plachetka; eugene izotov and Scott Hostetler, oboi d’amore;

David McGill, bassoon)

Et in Spiritum sanctum Dominum et vivificantem,

qui ex Patre Filioque procedit;

qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et conglorificatur;qui locutus est per Prophetas.Et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam.

20. Chorus

Confiteor unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum.

21. Chorus

Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum

et vitam venturi saeculi. Amen.

and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of

the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son,

who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. I believe in one, holy, catholic, and

apostolic Church.

I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins

and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead

and the life of the world to come. Amen.

(Please turn the page quietly.)

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SanCtuS22. Chorus

Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus,Dominus Deus Sabaoth.Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria ejus.

23. Chorus

Osanna in excelsis.

24. aria (Saimir Pirgu; Mathieu Dufour, flute)

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

25. Chorus

Osanna in excelsis.

agnuS DEI26. aria

(Anna Malavasi)

Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi,

miserere nobis.

27. Chorus

Dona nobis pacem.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,

have mercy on us.

Grant us peace.

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory.

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